I once rang the Daily Mail to mildly complain about a story I had a connection with. The journalist I spoke to put me on hold while he conferred with a colleague. At least, he thought he put me on hold. But courtesy of him hitting the wrong button, I got to hear what they were saying. And it wasn’t exactly a master class in concern for accuracy. Yet I still read the newspaper regularly.

Why? Because it would be foolish not to.

1. The Daily Mail is read by 4.6 million people, making it by some margin the most read daily national newspaper. And that’s without even getting into its website, which is now the most popular newspaper website in the world. You can’t be interested in what the media is saying and ignore it.

2. Very large numbers of Liberal Democrat voters read it: around 576,00 Daily Mail readers voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, a number only topped by the 796,000 or so Sun readers who voted Liberal Democrat. That Daily Mail figure is more than the equivalent figures for The Guardian and The Independent put together.

3. The Daily Mail invests heavily in its journalistic resources. Whatever you may think of how they write-up their stories, its journalists frequently break stories due to having the time to do the old-fashioned legwork. Its record in breaking stories about dodgy Labour donations under Gordon Brown was a classic example: the Mail unearthed the story because it sent journalists door-to-door calling on Labour donors until they found something.

4. And then there’s the question of how the stories are written up… In my view, all manner of stories end up being written up in a distorted manner, but you can usually do a reasonable job of extracting the truth from a Mail political story by:

• Ignore the headline: it often exaggerates so much for effect that it doesn’t really match the story.
• Read the first line to get what the story is about, and then read the story from the end upwards: there is often a defence included in the story towards the end which undermines what goes before. Although I’ve read plenty of their stories on political topics which I know about and thought the headline and first-half of the story was distorted, I’ve not (yet) come across one of these where the second-half didn’t provide the explanation as to why the story was wrong.
• Watch out carefully for who is quoted to support the story. The usual structure of the political scandal story is to have a quote from an opposition politician, often calling for an inquiry. There are some, from all parties – such as Vince Cable in the example linked to above – who have a track record of only calling for an inquiry or condemning someone when they have very good grounds to. Then there are others seemingly will happily condemn something based on the merest prod of encouragement from a journalist.

Apply these three tests and you can do pretty well at getting to the truth of a Daily Mail political story. I’ve seen plenty of devastating demolitions of Mail political stories, but those have all been ones where these three tests had warned me already. Of course, one day there’ll be a story that breaks all these rules, and all this leaves aside the question of what stories to choose to run in the first place…

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

[Nick Clegg's] view was backed by Mark Pack, co-editor of the blog Lib Dem Voice, who said the losses [in party support] were recoverable if the party continues to win policy successes, such as accelerating towards the £10,000 tax allowance.

Speaking on the same programme earlier in the day, Mr Pack said: ‘The Budget will be particularly important.

‘We are not going to see a big giveaway Budget.

‘But the influence of the Liberal Democrats is an open question.

‘There have been more Liberal Democrat policies implemented in the last year than in my lifetime – and yet politically we are not benefiting.

‘On the broad strategy, the party is united.’

Pssst, don’t tell the Daily Mail that I’m a foreigner.

MP Chris Huhne’s partner Carina Trimingham today brought a High Court damages action over a “cataclysmic interference” with her private life.

The PR adviser, whose adulterous affair with the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change became public in June 2010 – with Huhne leaving his wife of 26 years – is suing Associated Newspapers for misuse of private information.

Her counsel, William Bennett, told Mr Justice Tugendhat in London that – in eight newspaper articles and on its website Mail Online – the Daily Mail had exercised its expertise and determination to dig into 44-year-old Trimingham’s private life and disclose embarrassing facts…

“It is exposing aspects of the sexual history of the claimant which she says she is entitled to keep confidential, and we say there is no public interest in exposing those elements of her.”

You can read the full story here.

Yet at the heart of the Yes campaign in last week’s AV referendum seems to have been a big mistake: trying to run a grassroots campaign to win a national contest.

Grassroots campaigns can pick off parts of a country. Grassroots campaigns can win when there is no national opponent (cf the campaign against the government’s forestry proposals last year – a very effective use of grassroots mobilisation, but not up against a direct opposing campaign). Grassroots campaigns can also raise the funds that fuel national media and advertising campaigns (cf Barack Obama and his mamoth TV advertising spending for the 2008 Presidential contest).

But where a grassroots campaign is up against a national media and advertising campaign against it, grassroots are not enough.

In its own terms, the Yes campaign’s grassroots efforts were very impressive: dominating local media coverage for the much of the campaign with local events and stunts; huge numbers of volunteers brought into the campaign; impressive online donation figures and levels of web traffic that easily beat the No campaign.

There were, inevitably, some mistakes too – especially  in the very small number of different leaflets available which meant that even where there were people willing to regularly deliver an area it was extremely hard to do more than a couple of deliveries – and frequently the idea was that one leaflet would make a difference. (Just as doing only the one leaflet so often results in someone winning a Parliamentary election. Oh, hang on…)

But even without any of those mistakes none of that would have amounted to nearly enough in the face of a national politician speaking out in the national media. The headline polls moved when David Cameron started speaking out as Tory voters shifted heavily to the No camp in response. The No campaign may have run an extremely intensive online get out the vote campaign, but by then it didn’t really matter.

The combination of David Cameron and the Daily Mail is not a sure-fire election winner by any means (see May 2010 for a start), but the answer does not rest with street stalls and tweets in a national contest.

Of course you cannot magic ideal supporters out of thin air, but in the end it mattered far more that so many Labour MPs, peers and councillors did not follow Ed Miliband’s lead, that no Conservative MPs came out unequivocally for a Yes vote and that only the usual suspects amongst media outlets backed a Yes vote (and many of them half-heartedly).

There are many things political parties and campaigners can learn from the grassroots and online efforts of both sides (as Paul Waugh has pointed out) but the most important is a reminder of the limitations of both.

Makes you want to work for the Mail so you can share in the collective pride at its work, doesn’t it?

Asked the impact on their voting intention of those papers opposing Nick Clegg becoming Prime Minister, 15% said it made them more likely to vote Liberal Democrat and only 4% said it made them less likely, making for a net +11% saying they are more likely to vote Liberal Democrat.

Of the rest, 19% would vote Liberal Democrat regardless, 35% would not vote Liberal Democrat anyway and 27% said it wouldn’t alter their vote but they weren’t yet sure which way to vote.

The question doesn’t capture the potential agenda setting power of these three newspapers, but on the other hand the question was (deliberately) asked in a low key way, with no reference for example to the tax or residence status of newspaper proprietors such as Rupert Murdoch or the Barclay brothers. Moreover, so far part of the impact of the three titles running strident anti-Liberal Democrat stories has been to generate coverage by TV broadcasters about whether or not a smear operation is taking place.

Given that the public says it trusts TV much more than newspapers this, combined with our poll finding, illustrates the risk the three newspaper titles are running with their reputation, especially given the publicity given to the explicit comments by The Sun’s political editor that he sees it as his job to help get Cameron elected.

Journalism overall is a deeply distrusted profession in the UK and it’s a rare business situation where reducing levels of trust doesn’t end up damaging commercial prospects. Therefore not only may a backlash to their coverage drown out their attempts to influence the election result, but a hostile public reaction makes the commercial future look tougher  for all three titles who – along with other newspapers – are trying to find ways to persuade people to pay them for news.

I asked George Pascoe-Watson, former political editor at The Sun, about this trust issue at an event a couple of weeks ago and he rather dismissively said it was “fashionable” for people to say they don’t trust journalists. Even if you agree with that (and I think he misses the more substantial changes at work), fashion is what make people spend or stop spending money all the time.

The end result may be that the newspapers fail to damage Nick Clegg’s reputation but end up damaging their own – winning votes for the Liberal Democrats but losing customers for themselves. That’s at one end of the spectrum of possible outcomes, but it shows how much is at stake not just for political parties but also for newspapers.

The poll was carried out 23-26 April online by Vision Critical (Angus Reid), a member of the British Polling Council. 1,810 British adults were surveyed and the data was weighted by age, gender, social class, region, newspaper readership and past vote. The full question was, “The newspapers in this country tend to take a position and support different parties at election time. It has been suggested that the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph do not want Nick Clegg to be Prime Minister. If those newspapers were to take this stance would that make you more or less likely to vote Liberal Democrat?”. Data table here (Excel file).

As Next Left points out, the story doesn’t have a name to it – just the generic “Daily Mail reporter” by-line. I wonder why?

UPDATE: As pointed out by several people on Twitter, the News of the World ran a similar piece first.

UPDATE 2: And as for Jan Moir’s contribution: sigh.

Courtesy of social media, there is increasingly a different pattern: grumble online, see other people also grumbling online, grumble some more and hey presto – the complaints reach a much wider audience as online word of mouth spreads the word.

There is a classic example of this old versus new media conflict at work today. Following his surge in the opinion polls, Nick Clegg on the morning of the second TV debate faced a barrage of attacks from a number of British newspapers, including The Sun, Daily Mail and Telegraph. Probably weirdest amongst these attacks are those over a newspaper article Nick Clegg wrote and had publised in a national newspaper eight years ago.

So outrageous was this article that, er…, it took eight years for the Telegraph and Mail to get round to reporting it.

One reaction to this has been a burst of spurious other ‘shock revelations’ posted to Twitter but people angered by the newspaper industry’s behaviour – with the hashtag for these messages #nickcleggsfault making it into the Twitter worldwide trending topics list. (See the Metro’s report for a selection of the best and this post for the meme’s origin.)

As previous incidents such as the Jan Moir controversy have shown, a sudden upsurge of popular opinion via social media can at times be too much for the traditional media establishment to ignore.

The big danger for several newspapers this time round is that they are already rated the second-least trusted profession in the UK in MORI’s annual trust surveys (only just beating politicians) and they are facing steady falls in the number of people willing to buy their content. Being the brunt of such public anger and ridicule may firm up support and sales from their core audience – or may further damage their reputation and feed further declines in sales.

Transcript:
Tom: The way media interpret these things is really important. I contacted you because of the reaction my parents had given what was published this morning. They are Daily Mail readers. They are Telegraph readers. They voted Tory since Thatcher. They voted Tory in 1997. They, like me, do not want a Labour government.

They felt uncomfortable with Cameron, particularly with his Inheritance Tax policy. They’re ordinary middle-class people and they do not have anything like the kind of wealth to see them benefiting from that.

And, erm, I think it has been incredibly important that, or rather the way the papers have reacted today have been important in solidifying their opinion that they are not going to vote for the Conservative.

Vic Derbyshire: Right. So they are blaming the Conservative supporting newspapers they read for these attacks on Clegg and it is making them not to vote Conservative?

Tom: No, no. I think they moved from their position. They wanted an anti-Brown vote… (”right”) I think they moved in that position already.

I think the influence of the papers…erm, they wanted a debate, and particularly with the Nazi slur on Clegg, they are very angry about that. (”are they”).. [inaudible] both of the papers they buy, to have an open, honest debate, and they are not seeing that.

Hat-tip: Liberal Conspiracy